Tuesday 22 March 2011 13.07 EDT
First published on Tuesday 22 March 2011 13.07 EDT

PRINKIPO, MARCH

The old view about the backwardness of countries seized by dictatorships can no longer be maintained. Though it was possible to apply it to Italy, with some exaggeration, it cannot possibly be applied to Germany, which is a highly developed capitalist country in the very heart of Europe.

There is one common reason for the collapse of democracy: capitalist society has outlived its strength. The national and international antagonisms which break out in it destroy the democratic structure just as world antagonisms are destroying the decorative structure of the League of Nations. Where the progressive class shows itself unable to seize power so as to reconstruct society on the basis of Socialism, capitalism in its agony can only preserve its existence by using the most brutal anti-cultural methods, the extreme expression of which is Fascism. That historic fact appears in Hitler's victory. In February, 1929, I wrote as follows in an American review:—

On the analogy of the electrical industry democracy may be defined as a system of switches and fuses directed against the violent shocks of national or social struggle. No epoch in the history of man has been so filled with antagonisms as our own. The switches of democracy are fusing or breaking under the violent pressure of class and international antagonisms. That is the kernel which explains the rapid rise of dictatorship.

My opponents relied on the fact that the process had only laid hold of the fringe of the civilised world. But I replied: "The strength of internal and world antagonisms is not declining but growing. . . . Gout begins with the little finger or the big toe, but once it has begun it progresses till it reaches the heart."

For many the choice between Bolshevism and Fascism is rather like a choice between Satan and Beelzebub. It is difficult to say anything comforting about this. It is clear that the twentieth century is the most disturbed century within the memory of humanity. Any contemporary of ours who wants peace and comfort before anything has chosen a bad time to be born.

Hitler's movement has been lifted to victory by 17,000,000 desperate people; it proves that capitalist Germany has lost faith in a decaying Europe which was converted by the Treaty of Versailles into a madhouse but was not provided with strait-jackets. The victory of the party of despair was only possible because Socialism, the party of hope, showed itself unable to seize power. The German proletariat is both numerous and civilised enough to achieve this, but the party leaders have shown themselves incompetent.